The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Praxis, the root of theory

Sethren, winter is back again and where I have been I know
not.My robes are stained, I have a
copious and hacking cough, my mouth is dry, I shiver, I have a significant
contusion on my left temple, a headache, and my hernia and piles are not at
their best.All thought, all remembrance,
of what I might have been going to say about Othello and myth has vacated my
ideoverse, leaving not one huddled, hypothermic demon behind.But I am delighted to see you foregathered,
and in no lesser numbers than before.Your faith is a modern-day beacon, one LED pricking through the
moorgrime that swirls down from the grey brown dereliction of Holme Moss and
wuthers round the ring road.

Let me try to gather what is left in and about my abused
neural substrate.

I leapt too far ahead with the myth.First we must deal with the praxis.And praxis is primarily about things.How things evolve.All of evoculture is dependent on the
evolution of things, myth as much as anything, the cross, the swastika.The original Palladion, a wooden carving of
Athene, of numinous antiquity, was carried by Aeneas to new-found Rome, and when
Constantine completed the relocation of Roman power to Byzantium he took the
Palladion with him and buried it under an eponymous (with Constantine, not
Athene) pillar in the new forum.So let us
turn back to the bedrock for a while, to the evolution of things.

Praxis precedes theory, because the thing, the flint blade, the bone needle,
precedes the concept.That
infinitesimally fine-grained progression of cultural evolution that started
maybe three million years ago was located in things, in in-the-world praxis,
and it was the Ha!?’s pondering upon how things behaved
in the world that began the expansion of the metaverse to encompass what we traditionally call ideas.But, fuck me, sethren, it was a slow process.Too slow to be noticeable over a lifetime, or a hundred or a
thousand lifetimes.Nonetheless, look
at the continents, what speed they move apart at or together, measurable in
millimetres per year, and yet it is a fair swim today from Luanda to Buenos
Aires.Even when things speeded up, when
the modern neural substrate was more or less up and running, maybe 200,000
years ago, there wasn’t a noticeable burst of speed, no smoke and burning
rubber down the drag strip.Cultural
evolution of the earliest antiquity would make a snail look like Usain Bolt.

When we gaze at one of the bedrock praxes, flint knapping
for instance, we see something fully human, and fully part of evoculture.Things have moved beyond the furthest
horizons of a chimpanzee.Things have also
moved beyond mere acts and concepts.Acts
and concepts will account for the adventitious flake which might be used to cut
or scrape.But think of the barbed flint
arrowhead.Think of the knowledge that
must never be lost — because as we have seen if it is lost for a micro-second
it is lost for ever, or at least until it has re-evolved — that is the
tradition of making barbed flint arrowheads.The quarry of suitable mineral substance must be located, either by way
of the metaverse or by searching with intent in the world, the core excised from
the quarry, sometimes carried a distance to the work site, prepared, and only then the flake struck off and knapped, with a manual skill greater than most found today, into a complex
shape.And the next bit is where the
evolution of things is crucially different from the evolution of life.The next bit is where the praxis emerges. The next bit is where the arrowhead is
attached to the shaft, either with an adhesive, or a binding, or both.

Suddenly, the immense power of evoculture is there before
our eyes.In the attachment of the
arrowhead to the shaft, two, three, four complex traditions are combined in one
thing, the barbed mineral-headed arrow.These
four complex traditions parallel the evolution of four things, the stone, the
stick, the cord and the glue. We see in
an instant how, once up to speed, like now, today, on the Huddersfield
ringroad, evoculture can outpace the evolution of life by ordersof magnitude, until it may consume complex
life itself, sparing only the scorpion and the sand viper.It is this combination of things that were
once separate, and the parallel combination of on the one hand traditions, and on the other of the operative
Ha!?s who are the hosts of those traditions (the flint knapper, the fletcher,
the cord maker, the bitumen or vegetable gum specialist, the bow maker) that is
the praxis.It is the praxis, sethren,
which, beyond acts and concepts, is the supercharger, the afterburner of
cultural evolution.

But sod all that for a lark:

…Aprille, with his showres soote

Has perced every droghte to the roote,

And drowned every vein in swich licour

By which vertue engendered is the flour…

And now it’s May, whan the swete byrdes shulde singe, but we
are chilled to the swyving bone, sethren.More praxis anon, but mine very own sether wenden from afar on
pilgrimage tomorrow, and I have stuff to do.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.